Capital Index
Each of the three economic sectors (Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce) has it's own Capital Index. The Capital Index shows the amount of "work" the sector currently does. This in turn determines (together with the resource factors) how much resources are used and (together with the GDP factors) how much GDP is generated. Weather events, resource shortages and a financial crisis destroy Capital Index, which is a major factor in the collapse of the economy. Calculation Underlying the displayed Capital Index there are two hidden variables. * Work per Worker (or Capital Index per Worker) * Worker * Maximum Work (or Maximum Capital Index) The displayed Capital Index will be the lowest of the two. The player can not see which one is the lowest or how high is the other one. For maximum efficiency both values should align as close as possible. Otherwise you get one or the other imbalance: Example 1 - Under-utilized Capital Index The sector has 16 million workers and produces 34 Capital Index per 1 million workers. The maximum size of the sector is 600. The sector produces 544 Capital Index (16*34) out of possible 600. 544 is displayed in the GUI. 56 Capital Index remains unused and invisible. Example 2 - Wasted Capital Index The sector has 16 million workers and produces 34 Capital Index per 1 million workers. The maximum size of the sector is 500. The sector would produce 544 Capital Index (16*34) but the Size is capped at 500. 500 is displayed in the GUI. 44 Capital Index is 'wasted' and invisible. Conclusions Amount of Workers The amount of workers working in a sector is neither dependent on the available Capital Index, nor on the amount of Work a Worker does. It instead depends on a different set of variables as described in Jobs. Also increasing Jobs or Job efficiency (Work per Worker) only has an impact if there is still under-utilized Capital Index available. Resource usage The amount of resources used is directly proportional with the currently displayed Capital Index. But different regions demand different factors of resources for 1 Capital Index. GDP Different regions generate different amounts of GDP per Capital Index. The exact formula is unknown, but one important factor is Base GDP, which is destroyed by whether events and contributes to the collapse of GDP in the late game. Cap & Grow Cards The most common cap for the economy is when the growth rate of the Max Capital Index stagnates. This happens when regions reach Development Level 4. From this point on, all increase in Workers or Work per Worker has no effect, since it is capped at the Max Capital Index. Even the Grow Sector cards can not overcome this hard cap of Capital Index. Region Start Values Each region has an individual start value for the Size and Work per Worker for each economic sector: There is also a Minimum Capital Index which is 10% of the Max Capital Index start values and does not change in the course of a game. Internal Game Code Internally effectiveness of a worker (Work per Worker) is tracked as robotspw (Robots per Worker) and the size of the sector is tracked as robots (Number of Robots). The Capital Index as displayed is thus the 'currently operated robots' divided by 1 million. In the examples above, either not all robots are operated, or there are not enough robots to operate and the humans just do nothing.